Lectures for a New Year: What Motivates Us, Aside from Money

In this RSA Animate video, author and former Al Gore speechwriter Dan Pink discusses a series of studies about what motivates people -- and more practically, what motivates workers. He takes apart the simplistic notion that monetary rewards result in better performance; such rewards do improve performance for purely mechanical tasks, but when you get into knowledge work, it's not just about the money. In this talk, Pink lays out a simple set of guidelines that will help any worker or employer understand what actually improves performance -- and that could lead to a better workplace for all of us. Have a look! Also, keep an eye open for an onscreen misspelling of "weird."

Topics: what does and does not motivate people; lots of examples; Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and OSS.

For: anyone who works, especially managers.

Further Reading

Dan Pink wrote a book on this topic (boy, that's really a theme with these lectures, isn't it?) called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The Amazon reviews are mainly very positive, but the most popular is a 2-star review that distills the important parts of the book -- and effectively says, if you watch a video of Pink giving his talk (like you did above), you've already got the gist of the book. Anybody in the audience care to comment on the book?